Undergraduate Education

2011 statistics:

6,698 undergraduates pursue a major in USC Dornsife

23,687 students applied

Average SAT Score for the admitted freshman class: 2050-2210
Average GPA for the admitted freshman class: 3.8 unweighted

Average class size: 26 students

Undergraduates choose from more than 60 USC Dornsife majors and nearly 80 USC Dornsife minors.

Graduate Education

1,668 full-time graduate students are studying and conducting research in USC Dornsife (Fall 2011)

There are 20 Master's programs and 25 Ph.D. programs. Programs are offered across a spectrum of disciplines, including natural, physical and social sciences, and the humanities.

Forty percent of USC doctoral students are enrolled in USC Dornsife.

Faculty

Approximately 660 full-time faculty teach in 33 academic departments and programs.

In USC Dornsife, tenure-track faculty teach all core undergraduate courses.

Notable faculty in USC Dornsife include George A. Olah, Nobel Prize Winner; T.C. Boyle, American Academy of Arts and Letters; Antonio Damasio, internationally recognized leader in neuroscience; Carol Muske-Dukes, California Poet Laureate; and Michael Waterman, pioneer in computational biology and bioinformatics.

15 American Academy of Arts & Sciences Fellows

10 National Academy of Sciences Members

28 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows

Did You Know?

• Every USC Dornsife faculty member teaches undergraduate courses, even Distinguished and University Professors.
• For 40 years, USC Dornsife's Joint Educational Project (JEP), one of the nation's oldest and largest service-learning programs, has placed more than 68,000 USC students in community assignments.
• A survey on Science Watch ranks USC as 6th globally in total citations on earthquakes last 10 years.
• Fifteen of USC's last 20 valedictorians majored in USC Dornsife. (1992–2012)
• In 2008, nine out of the 10 USC Renaissance Scholars had a USC Dornsife major and/or minor.
• Almost 75 percent of the USC Associates Awards in Excellence in Teaching go to USC Dornsife faculty.
• By the time USC Dornsife students graduate, they've participated in three to four internships on average.
• The USC Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS), an interdisciplinary center funded for five years by $18.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, is one of only nine such centers in the nation. CEGS is playing a leading role in the effort to turn the promise of genomics into advances in understanding human disease and evolution.
• USC Dornsife is home to one of the first Ph.D. programs in literature and creative writing. There are upwards of 80 applications each year, for only four spots.
• In January 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became part of USC Dornsife. Established by Steven Spielberg, this collection preserves testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The collection at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education is the largest of its kind, comprising 52,000 audio-visual testimonies in 32 languages.
• USC Dornsife's Michael Waterman, University Professor and holder of the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences, pioneered computational biology, a revolutionary field combining biological sciences, mathematics and computer science. Computational biology has grown increasingly important in the age of the human genome project.
• Physics professor Eugene Bickers is known as "Professor Firewalker" for walking across hot coals to demonstrate heat transfer for his Physics 100 class.
• U.S. News & World Report ranked USC among the Top College Academic Programs in Service Learning 2006, recognizing initiatives such as USC Dornsife's Joint Educational Project (JEP). One of the nation's oldest and largest service-learning programs, JEP celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2011–12.
• Caleb Finch, the ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging, was voted one of America's top 50 innovators over 50 by the American Association of Retired People. He revolutionized the field of gerontology in the late 1960s when he demonstrated that aging in mammals could be delayed.
• The history department is home to three former presidents of the American Studies Association: George Sanchez, Lois Banner and Karen Halttunen.
• USC Dornsife has one of the largest image archives of Dead Sea Scrolls and many other ancient Near Eastern texts in the world. The InscriptiFact Image Database, a joint project of USC Dornsife and the USC Libraries, distributes high-resolution images of ancient texts to scholars, teachers and students in 43 countries and is broadly acknowledged to be the most sophisticated image archive of its type and kind available today.
• Between 1981 and 1999, Larry Swanson, Michel Baudry and Richard Thompson were among the 100 most highly cited neuroscientists in the world.
• USC Dornsife's School of International Relations is the second oldest in the U.S. and the third oldest in the world, celebrating its 85th anniversary in 2009.
• Two English professors were finalists for the 2003 National Book Awards. T. C. Boyle and Carol Muske-Dukes were nominated in fiction and poetry, respectively, for Drop City and Sparrow. (USC Dornsife was the only institution to boast two nominees.)